Simple Editing Tip to Make Your Scenes More Powerful & Dramatic
Robert Hardy is the founder of the filmmaker's process and former writer for No Film School . In this article from No Film School, Robert shows you how the power of a simple editing trick can change the tone of the story.
This Simple Editing Technique Will Make Your Scenes More Dramatic & Powerful
Film editing is, by its very nature, a study in manipulation.
On a surface level, we manipulate the order of events unfolding on screen. We choose what a character says or doesn't say simply by including or excluding certain pieces of media from our timelines. We can even take completely unrelated pieces of video or audio and give them new meaning, as well as change the meaning of everything around them, depending on where they're placed in the timeline. That's a lot of power. On a much more subtle level, however, an experienced editor can greatly enhance the emotionality of a scene using different types of temporal manipulations. They can compress time to build energy and make everything seem faster and more kinetic. They can decompress, or lengthen, certain periods of time in order to accentuate the emotionality and drama of any given moment. These are the types of manipulations that separate the good editors from the great ones. My good friend Paddy Bird, an extremely experienced documentary editor and the founder of Inside The Edit, recently pulled a tutorial from his course that shows us – with incredible depth and precision – one of the most powerful techniques he uses to enhance drama in a scene. This technique is called "dramatic sync tempo decompression," and used correctly, this simple practice can take your work to another level entirely.
For those that don't have the time to watch the video, here's a quick recap.
In most genres and styles of filmmaking, documentary and non-fiction in particular, your characters rarely speak or act in a way that is conducive to creating great drama on screen. In narrative, hopefully this would be resolved on set with the director giving constructive and focused performance notes to the actors. In documentaries, however, you rarely have that type of creative control over the characters. That's where the editor steps in.
The most dramatic and enlightening moments often happen very quickly, which means that if we leave them at their original tempo in our timeline, they probably won't have as much of an impact on the audience as they should. That's where temporal decompression comes into play. Once you've identified the most emotional moments in your scene, you can artificially add time between spoken phrases in order to make every word more impactful. Essentially, you're creating dramatic pauses to amplify each and every word, which gives the audience time to digest and ponder what is being said, automatically giving it more dramatic power.
Read the rest here.
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